They should still be here

How many near misses between helicopters and airplanes should occur at one airport before some kind of action is taken?

I’m guessing your answer is less than 15,214.

How many feet below a descending airplane carrying your family members should a military helicopter be allowed to fly? Would your answer change if the crew was flying at night using night vision goggles?

Either way, I’m guessing your number is greater than 75 feet.

Yesterday, the NTSB released its preliminary report on the crash. It was mostly a detailed accounting of what happened. As NTSB Chairman Jennifer Homendy noted in her remarks, “The part that takes longer is the how and the why.”

But even as they continue their investigation, the NTSB also issued a set of urgent recommendations to the FAA to address what Homendy described as an “intolerable risk to aviation safety.” These recommendations also gave us a hint at least part of the how and why.

The supporting data revealed that in the roughly three years between October 2021 and December 2024, there were 15,214 near misses between commercial airplanes and helicopters near DCA alone.

In 85 of these instances, the helicopters and planes were less than 1,500 feet apart laterally and less than 200 feet apart vertically.

Think about that for a second.

More than twice per month, two speeding aircraft, with at least one in a rapid descent or ascent, were zooming by each other with less than two football fields of vertical separation.

And the most frustrating part? Many of these pilots were following the rules at the time.

Another piece of information shared by the NTSB yesterday is that under the normal operating conditions approved by the FAA, the vertical gap between the altitude ceiling for military helicopters and the expected glide path of a landing airplane on DCA runway 33 was a mere 75 feet.

I can’t even use the old football field analogy here, because it’s less than one.

And that’s a generous number. It might actually be less depending on how far from the shoreline the helicopter was flying—which, inexplicably, is not governed by any rules.

So, that was the margin of error that humans with night vision goggles, relying on inconsistent altitude instrumentation and guidance from understaffed FAA personnel using 1980s technology, were working with in this airspace.

This was not an unavoidable freak accident. This was a cascading set of systemic failures, and the one I am writing about today is just one of them.

Our family members should still be here. It’s hard not to get angry about that.

But anger won’t bring them back. Nothing will.

All I can do is advocate for change so this doesn’t happen again.

There are very few things that our entire country agrees on right now. But I have yet to find one person who thinks that the conditions that led to this crash are acceptable.

If you live in the United States, I encourage you to contact your elected representatives in Congress and request that they conduct non-partisan hearings on this topic, with a focus on enacting real change that will make the skies safer for all of our families.